MY LIFE AND MY FILMS

These memoirs will remind you of the picture done by Renoir pere, Jean in cuds in a flowerbed, the eternally obliged Fauntleroy: it could be the image of his lifelong psychic situation. Not that the world was always so sweet for Jean, but that he realized early on that it was for him to say what mattered and what didn't. In the forthright Renoir household he learned the tolerance and respect for natural unity that is a form of Gallic Buddhism; and he also absorbed an artist's sense of imaginative responsibility. Lived by anyone else, his life could have been dreadful, at least from time to time -- selling off his father's paintings as films failed, getting shot up in the First World War and made a refugee by the Second. But no: a gallant half-page about the break with Catherine Hessling; a Chaplinesque moment when he fell in with Hitler's motorcade; then a cinematic escape; and a page for the serenity of sleeping in a barnful of Cezannes. Wonderful memories of Hollywood, Von Sternberg, neither essentially pleasant, and of other subjects quite undistinguished except for the glow reflected through his lens.